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76 [130] MAGELLAN
MAGELLAN [130] He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Nuremberg, and is best remembered for the globes he made. The one he constructed in 1515 was the first globe to include the new lands discov ered by Columbus [121] and to name those lands “America,” as Waldseemiiller [125] had suggested. In later life, Schoner abandoned the priesthood and became a Lutheran. [130] MAGELLAN, Ferdinand (ma- jel'an) Portuguese explorer Born: Sabrosa, Tras-os-Montes, about 1480 Died: Philippine Islands, April 27, 1521
Through most of his life, Magellan was a loyal son of Portugal. He served as page at the court of John II, the king who turned down Columbus [121]. He was on expeditions to the East Indies and fought in Morocco, where he was wounded in action and permanently lamed. He was denied a pension, accused of trading with the Moroccans—tan tamount to treason—and was dismissed from the armed forces in 1517. Magellan, bitter at this treatment, joined the Spanish service and offered to show the Spaniards a way to poach on Portuguese preserves. It seems that shortly after the voyage of Columbus, a north-south line had been drawn down the Atlantic under the auspices of Pope Alexander VI. All heathen lands west of the line were to belong to Spain, all east to Portugal. However, the line was not drawn completely around the earth and Magellan pointed out to Emperor Charles V that if the Spaniards contin ued to sail westward, they would stay on their side of the line and yet find them selves in the East Indies, which the Por tuguese were then exploiting. In other words, Magellan was proposing to do what Columbus had intended, but to do it right. He was placed in command of an ex pedition, therefore, and set sail on Au gust 10, 1519, with five ships. The ships crossed the Atlantic and sailed down the eastern coast of South America, search ing for a sea passage through the conti nent. They found it finally far to the south, a passage still called the Strait of Magellan. (He called it the Strait of All Saints.) On this portion of the voyage they also sighted dim luminous clouds in the night sky that looked like detached pieces of the Milky Way. Visible only in the southern hemisphere, they are still called the Magellanic Clouds. Four cen turies later, Leavitt [975] was to forge of them a mighty measuring rod for the heavens.
After a stormy and hellish voyage through the strait, Magellan burst into the calm of a great ocean, doing in real life (for a European) what Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner was to do in the poem. (“We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea.”) The ocean had been discovered at Panama by Balboa [128] seven years before and named the South Sea, but Magellan, because of its calm ness after the storms of the strait, called it the Pacific Ocean. Actually it is no more pacific than the Atlantic is. For ninety-eight days Magellan crossed the Pacific with no sign of land. He seized the occasion to try an ocean sounding, the first on record. He paid out nearly half a mile of rope in the mid-Pacific and did not reach bottom. The empty wastes of waters, calm but terribly blank, reduced the crew to des peration and starvation. On the brink of disaster they reached Guam on March 6, 1521, and were able to take on food and water. They then sailed to the Philip pines, where Magellan was killed in a squabble with the natives. Magellan’s expedition was the first to circumnavigate the earth, for one last ship, the Victoria, under Cano [124], managed to make its way across the In dian Ocean, around the southern tip of Africa and back to Spain, arriving Sep tember 8, 1522. The voyage had lasted three years and cost four ships, but the spices and other merchandise brought back by the surviving vessel were enough to allow a handsome profit. Magellan’s ships had accomplished a heroic task—for the technology of the 77 [131] PARACELSUS PARACELSUS
day—equivalent to the orbital flight of Gagarin [1502], It proved once and for all that the estimate of Eratosthenes [48] as to the size of the earth was correct and that of Poseidonius [52] and Ptol emy [64] was wrong. It also proved that a single stretch of water girdles the earth. There was one sea, not seven. [131] PARACELSUS (par-uh-sel'sus), Philippus Aureolus Swiss physician and alchemist Born: Einsiedeln, Schwyz, May 1, 1493
Died: Salzburg, Austria, Septem ber 24, 1541 Paracelsus’ real name was Theo phrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, but in a fit of vainglory he named him self Paracelsus, meaning “better than Celsus” [57], the Roman physician whose works had recently been trans lated into Latin and had made a great impression on Paracelsus’ contem poraries. His father, a professor at a school of mines, taught him medicine and he him self studied everywhere he could, at the University of Basel which he entered in 1510, in Austrian mines, and wherever his feet carried him. He had to do much wandering (from Ireland to Russia to Turkey, according to his own account), part of it not altogether voluntary, for his life was marked by eccentricity, quarrelsomeness, and a vast army of en emies lovingly manufactured by himself. Despite a mystical obscurity of state ment, he marks the beginning of the transition from alchemy to chemistry. Paracelsus came to one crucial deci sion about the purpose of alchemy. The purpose of alchemy, he decided, was not to discover methods for manufacturing gold but to prepare medicines with which to treat disease. (These views of his were eventually developed into a sys tem called iatrochemistry.) It was a point of view then coming into fashion, as in the case of Paracelsus’ contem porary and fellow physician Agricola [132] , but it was Paracelsus’ loud mouth that did most to bring it to general no tice.
Before Paracelsus’ time, such medi cines as were used were from plant sources, but Paracelsus stressed the im portance of minerals, although he was the first to use the plant-derived tincture of opium in medical treatment (naming it laudanum). He did not always achieve happy results, for his almost psychotic cocksureness led him to use such medi cines as compounds of mercury and an timony even after practice had shown them to be toxic. Nor did Paracelsus in any way give up the mysticism of alchemy and astrology. He believed wholeheartedly in the four elements of the Greeks and the three principles (mercury, sulfur, and salt) of the Arabs as well as the influence of stars on disease. He sought unceasingly for the philosopher’s stone, which he believed to be an elixir of life, and even claimed to have found it, insisting that he would live forever. (To be sure, he died before he was fifty, but that was no real test: He drank heavily and his death was apparently brought about by an ac cidental fall.) He had the courage of his convictions. As town physician at Basel, he burned the works of Galen [65] and Avicenna [86] in public in 1527 and found no terms too harsh to denounce the an cients, whose theory of humors he would not accept. He also insisted on lecturing in Ger man, not Latin, and admitted barber-sur geons to his courses even though they sullied their hands with actual dissec tions. The result was that he was kicked out of Basel in 1528. That, however, didn’t stop him and for the rest of his life he kept furiously inveighing against his enemies and predecessors. He seized medicine by the scruff of its neck, so to speak, and if it wasn’t entirely sense that he shook into it, the shaking was beneficial just the same. He wrote intelli gently on the problems of mental dis ease, for instance, scoffing at theories of demonic possession. He studied lung diseases of miners and associated them with mining. He cor rectly diagnosed congenital syphilis. He
[132] AGRICOLA
FERNEL [134] also correctly associated head injury with paralysis, and cretinism (a form of men tal and physical retardation) with goiter. Paracelsus was the first to describe zinc, and he is sometimes considered its discoverer, though zinc, at least in alloy form as brass, was known even in an cient times. * [132] AGRICOLA, Georgius (a-grik'- oh-luh) German mineralogist Born: Glauchau, Saxony, March 24, 1494 Died: Chemnitz (modern Karl Marx Stadt), Saxony, November 21, 1555 Agricola was the son of a draper and his real name was Georg Bauer but, as was rather the fashion of his time, he Latinized it. Agricola in Latin and Bauer in German both mean “farmer.” Agricola was a physician by profes sion, having graduated from the Univer sity of Leipzig about 1518, then having studied medicine at the University of Ferrara in Italy. In the fashion of his contemporary Paracelsus [131] he be came interested in mineralogy through its possible connection with medicines and through the miners’ diseases he stud ied. In fact, the connection between medicine and minerals and the combina tion of the physician-mineralogist was to remain a prominent feature in the devel opment of chemistry for two and a half centuries. Agricola began his medical practice in 1527 in Joachimsthal, a mining center where he grew well-to-do through clever mining investments. Later, as his fame grew, he was subsidized by Prince Maurice of Saxony. In 1531 he traveled to Chemnitz where mining was even more important. Here he served as town physician and in 1546 became its mayor. His most important work, De Re Me
his death, but in it he summarized all the practical knowledge gained by the Saxon miners. It was clearly written and had excellent illustrations of mining machin ery, so that it became popular at once and indeed remains a worthy classic of science even today. It has been trans lated into English by Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover. Through this book Agric ola earned his title of father of mineral ogy. And, incidentally, it is he who may have coined the word “petroleum.” [133] APIAN, Peter (ay'pee-an) German astronomer
Apian, who was also known as Petrus Apianus and Peter Bienewitz, studied mathematics and astronomy at Leipzig and Vienna and prepared maps that were based on the work of Waldsee- miiller [125]. He wrote books populariz ing both mathematics and astronomy and served as professor of mathematics at the University of Ingolstadt, where he remained to his death. He was knighted by Emperor Charles V. His importance to science rests on a single observation. In 1540, he published a book in which he describes his obser vations of comets, and in which he de scribes the appearances of five different comets including the one that was later to be known as Halley’s comet. In the course of these descriptions, he mentions the fact that comets have their tails al ways pointing away from the sun. This was the first scientific observation concerning comets other than their posi tion in the sky. [134] FERNEL, Jean François (fer-nel') French physician
Mame, April 26, 1558. Femel, the son of an innkeeper, grad uated from the University of Paris in 1519. He went on to obtain his medical degree in 1530 and in 1534 became pro fessor of medicine there. About 1547, after having successfully treated Diane de Poitiers, the king’s mistress, he be came physician to the king himself, Henry II of France, even though he had failed to prevent the king’s father, 7 9
[135] TARTAGLIA FUCHS
Francis I, from dying of syphilis earlier that year. (But then, no one in those days could have.) Femel’s reputation grew high enough to earn for him the sobriquet of the Modern Galen [65]. Femel was the first modern physician to make dissection an important part of his clinical duties. He wrote a book on the subject in 1542 and in it did not hes itate to correct Galen’s errors. He was the first to describe appendicitis. He also described peristalsis (the waves of con traction of the alimentary canal) and noted the central canal of the spinal cord. He introduced the terms “physiol ogy” and “pathology.” He wrote also on astronomy and mathematics and rejected astrology as possessing no relevance whatever to medicine. [135] TARTAGLIA, Niccold (tahr-tal'- yah)
Italian mathematician Born: Brescia, 1499 Died: Venice, December 13, 1557 Tartaglia was brought up in poverty and was largely self-educated. His true name was Fontana and the nickname by which he is now universally known was born of a tragic incident in his child hood. Italy, after several centuries of high civilization, was made the victim of invading armies and was reduced to some centuries of beggary. When Tar taglia was about twelve his native town was sacked and a French soldier slashed his face. He recovered only through the loving care of his mother, and the wound left him with a speech defect and the name Tartaglia (“stutterer”). His mind, however, did not stutter and, as a mature man, he taught mathematics in various universities of northern Italy, coming to Venice at last in 1534. Tartaglia was the first to work out a general solution for equations of the third degree (cubic equations). In those days, mathematicians posed problems for each other, and upon their ability to solve those problems rested their reputa tions. Tartaglia could solve problems in volving cubic equations and could pose problems of that sort, which others found insoluble. Naturally, he kept his methods secret. Cardano [137] wheedled the method from, him under a promise of secrecy and eventually published it, something Tartaglia undoubtedly felt more deeply than ever he did the child hood slash. In 1537 Tartaglia published the first book on the theory of projectiles. (Leo nardo da Vinci [122] had written one that had not been published.) Tartaglia thought the ball began with “violent mo tion,” traveling straight from the can non’s mouth, and ended with “natural motion,” falling straight downward, with a region of “mixed motion” between. This did not agree, of course, with the practical experience of gunners, who could not, however, match Tartaglia’s theoretical arguments. Ballistics did not receive an accurate foundation until Galileo’s [166] time nearly a century later.
[136] FUCHS, Leonhard (fyooks) German botanist Born: Wemding, Bavaria, January 17, 1501 Died: Tübingen, May 10, 1566 Fuchs obtained his medical degree at the University of Ingolstadt in 1524. In 1528 he became private physician to the margrave of Brandenberg and in 1535, he became professor of medicine at the University of Tübingen. He remained there the rest of his life. Like Gesner [147], Fuchs interested himself in natural history and wrote books such as History of Plants (1542) in which numerous plant species were described in detail. There is a genus of shrubs that was eventually named in his honor because he described them, and the color of its flower has given him a kind of immortality. Not only the genus, but that particular color, a bluish red, is called fuchsia. Fuchs prepared the first important modern glossary of botanical terms. This represented a clear break from Dios- corides [59] and helped pave the way for
[137] CARDANO
GEMMA FRISIUS [138] modern botany. Fuchs was an active supporter of Vesalius [146], [137] CARDANO, Girolamo or Ge- ronimo (kahr-dah'noh) Italian mathematician Born: Pavia, September 24, 1501 Died: Rome, September 21, 1576 Cardano was the illegitimate son of a learned lawyer-mathematician who was a friend of Leonardo da Vinci [122], The young Cardano was nearly dead when he was born and passed a sickly and very unhappy childhood. The illegitimacy em bittered his adult life, too, for after hav ing attained his medical degree, he was denied admittance to the College of Phy sicians until he had earned that right by a clear demonstration of his excellence in the field. Eventually, his fame as a physician came to be second only to Vesalius [146] and he was admitted in 1539. In 1546, he was appointed profes sor of medicine at the University of Pavia.
He was the first to write a clinical de scription of the disease we now know as typhus fever. In 1552 he cured a Scottish cardinal of asthma by forbidding him to use feathers in his bed, and this showed an intuitive understanding of the phe nomenon of allergy. He had vague no tions of evolution, believing all animals were originally worms. He was also an astrologer, convinced of the validity of the “science” no matter how many times his predictions failed. He even attempted (so some said) to cast the horoscope of Jesus, a deed that resulted in his impris onment for a time. He was a thoroughgoing knave and rascal, a gambler, cheat, given to mur derous rage, insufferably conceited and yet, withal, a first-class mathematician. He was the first, for instance, to recog nize the value of negative numbers and imaginary numbers. He also put his gambling to use by writing a book on the mathematics of chance—a prelude to the complete opening of the subject by Pascal [207] and Fermat [188]. He obtained the method of solving cubic equations from Tartaglia [135] in 1539, then published the method six years later despite having solemnly vowed to keep it secret—an act that has placed a permanent blot on his memory. He did give Tartaglia credit, but the method is still called “Cardano’s rule.” The importance of this incident lay in the fact that it aroused controversy on the ethics of scientific secrecy. Eventu ally the decision was made that secrecy is of great harm to science and that the credit for any finding must go not to the man who first makes the discovery, but to the one who first publishes it. This is now universally accepted. It has led to some injustices, as in the case of Scheele [329] and John Couch Adams [615], but on the whole the rule has served the cause of science well. In his two hundred works, Cardano contributed useful ideas to science. He was the first to grasp the water cycle: that the seas are evaporated, that the vapor turns to rain, that the rain flows back to the ocean via the rivers. Cardano’s later life was tragic. His fa vorite son married a worthless woman who was repeatedly unfaithful. The son overreacted by murdering his wife and, despite Cardano’s efforts in the defense, was executed in 1560 for the murder. Cardano was brokenhearted over this and the fact that another son was con stantly being jailed for various crimes did not help. Cardano himself did not al ways escape punishment for his knav eries. In 1570 he himself spent some time in prison for debt or heresy or, pos sibly, both. There is a persistent story that in old age Cardano predicted (astrologically) the day of his own death. When the day came and found him in good health, he killed himself. This sounds too dramatic to be true. [138] GEMMA FRISIUS, Reiner Dutch geographer
The surname “Frisius” refers to Gemma’s birth in Frisia (Friesland). He received his medical degree at the Uni Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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